The Festival World up to 1850

As George IV and William IV brought the Hanoverian succession to an end, and Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, so significant developments were under way in the choral life of the country. On the festival scene, while the Three Choirs continued in its by now traditional way, others were being more experimental, although few festivals managed to survive on a longterm basis. Three centres in particular, Birmingham, Norwich and York, attracted national attention, and of these Birmingham would turn out to be the most significant. York had held occasional festivals from 1769, including a four-day celebration in 1791, but it was the 1820s that saw it attempt grandiose affairs on a scale to match the magnificence of the Minster. For the first ‘Yorkshire Musical Festival’ in 1823 a choir of 273 was accompanied by an orchestra of 180 – easily the largest forces seen since the London Handel Commemorations, and mostly coming from the North. Of the choir's 64 sopranos, only 13 were boys, reflecting the long northern tradition of women's participation in choral activity; the 55-strong alto line, however, was still an all-male preserve. Handel continued to dominate the choral offerings, although parts of The Creation, The Seasons, and Mozart's Requiem also featured. Three further festivals followed in 1825, 1828 and 1835, with even larger numbers of performers – shades of London again – but there was severe criticism of the standard of the choir in 1835. The Times reported that ‘the trebles were often inclined to take a time of their own, and run riot’. A letter to the editor claimed that the poor performance was ‘entirely owing to the inattention of the conductors in the selection of the chorus singers and the total neglect of rehearsals’. Taken together with problems of positioning so many performers, this may have been one factor in bringing the series to an end, and it would be 1910 before York again experienced another large-scale festival.

Dense woodlands graced the rolling hills and mountain slopes connecting the coastal plains of northern and central Angola to the interior highlands. Botanically known as laurel forest, they formed a natural habitat for several varieties of robusta coffee (Coffea canephora). Tis forest landscape stretched from Mbanza Kongo (São Salvador) in the north to Seles in the south, at altitudes between 350 and 1,200 meters, with coffee growing best in areas between 800 and 1,000 meters above sea level. The river Cuanza divided this distinctive ecosystem into a northern and a southern zone. Because the transition from coast to plateau was more gradual in the north than in the south, woodlands were more extensive in the northern zone, where dense laurel forest changed into a forest-savanna mosaic towards the west. Tis area contained the oldest coffee-producing regions in Angola, which during the twentieth century were incorporated in the Cuanza-Norte and Congo administrative districts.

Botanists knew these rugged woodlands also as the ‘cloud forest’, as the hills attracted condensation building up in the lower areas, while they shielded vegetation from dry winds blowing from the east. As a Scottish visitor to the region noted in 1854, ‘every evening clouds come rolling in great masses from the mountains in the west [and] generally remain on the hills till the morning is well spent’.1 Vegetation depended for water more on clouds than on rainfall, which was relatively modest in the region. There was an upper stratum of trees growing up to forty metres in height that shielded a lower storey of shrubs including natural coffee stands, which thrived in the humid and relatively mild climate of the montane forest. The forest canopy provided shade that kept soils moist and depressed weed growth, it reduced variations in temperature between day and night, and it protected coffee trees and soils from sun, wind, and occasional heavy rain.

Claudia Pineiro (1960–), the ‘First Lady of Argentinian Crime Writing’, is a leading figure in contemporary Latin American crime fiction, part of the current ‘noir wave’ of Argentinian women writers, and a highly visible spokesperson on women's issues, participating in the ‘green tide’ that successfully campaigned for free, safe, legal abortion in Argentina, and the #NiUnaMenos movement against feminicide. Her opening speech at the 2018 International Buenos Aires Book Fair outlines the writer's responsibility to question the social status quo, and she urges an ethical stance on educating the next generation to read – and think – critically: ‘When we disagree, if we don't have words then we speak with our body, with aggression, with weapons. Reading is a vital tool for acquiring skills in dialogue and in searching for creative solutions to old conflicts’.

It is within this ethical framework of writing that encourages the reader to reflect critically and articulate new responses to old conflicts (such as reproductive rights or religion vs secularism) that I situate Pineiro's crime novels, which ‘emphasize […] social dysfunction more than the crime itself ‘, focusing on ‘the crime behind the crime’, as Pineiro puts it.

In what other ways did the painted histories of the Welles-Ros Bible map the landscape of a baron's world, both the outer world of human relations and action and the inner spiritual, psychic and emotional worlds? Marriage and sexuality, a key concern of the Song of Songs initial, is also a principal theme of the initial for Hosea (see Fig. 93). Most of the fourteen chapters of this Prophetic book comprise oracles addressed to the declining Northern Kingdom of Israel, whose people had forsaken Yahweh and turned to other gods. Christian exegetes focused overwhelmingly on Hosea's first three chapters, which concern the prophet's scandalous marriage to Gomer and the calamities that befell his family. As the Welles-Ros text puts it, the Lord calls the prophet to “take a lecherous woman as your wife and make children of fornications because a lecherous land will sin before God (alt.: “will sin twice over”)” (Hos 1.2). Augustine saw in Gomer a prefiguration of the sinful woman who washed and anointed Jesus’ feet (Lk 7.36–50), and he and other writers interpreted Hosea's and Gomer's marriage allegorically as Christ calling and sanctifying the Church. In his Commentary on the Twelve Minor Prophets (392–406), Jerome interpreted Hosea 1–3 as signifying the rejection of Israel, yet he also justified Hosea's actions at a more “realworld” level:

“Melodrama” is not a word usually associated with Adalbert Stifter. The author whose third chapter of his most famous novel infamously turns on the question of whether or not it will rain, the author who devotes pages upon pages of text to detailed descriptions of gardening techniques or parquetry or snowdrifts, the author who seems himself to have lived a life of domestic tedium and bureaucratic obligation, broken up only by the pleasure of his copious meals, is not exactly known for his flamboyant emotionality or action-packed plots. While Stifter's peers admired his eye for detail and patient attunement to nature, they also criticized what they saw as a certain pedantic fastidiousness and a neglect of genuine human concerns in favor of a timeless, God’s-eye view of the world. In the age of the bourgeois tragedy and the social novel, Stifter, so ran the general consensus, was an outlier. At worst, his writings were deemed ploddingly reactionary and insipid; at best, they were seen as the work of a talented if limited miniaturist: masterly, at times even lovely— but dull.

In the eighteenth century, the publishing of music was the chief method by which a composer could disseminate their work, enabled by the support of other individuals, of which printers, publishers and music-sellers were the most important. One musician who had a particularly close involvement with the trade in printed music was the Doncaster-based organist, Edward Miller (1735–1807). At least fifteen of his music and pedagogical publications were issued between 1756 and 1800 by London music publishers, including three by Longman and Broderip, one of the foremost and largest English music-sellers of the late eighteenth century, and two by the firm's successor Broderip and Wilkinson (see Table 7.1). Miller's music was distributed widely across England, as admirably demonstrated by the impressive subscription list to his monumental work, The Psalms of David, for the Use of Parish Churches (1790). This work advocated the use of simple tunes and the training of church choirs to improve congregational singing, and features a list of over 2600 subscribers, making it the most successful musical publication by subscriber numbers to be published in eighteenth-century Britain. While Miller's career and profes- sional music network has received attention elsewhere, this chapter focuses on the 108 music traders who subscribed to the book: booksellers, music-sellers, stationers, engravers and printers. In doing so, this chapter explores the community of music traders across the country and the importance of their role in the dissemination and circulation of printed music in late eighteenth-century England.

INTRODUCTION

Although few documents have survived to throw any light on social conditions in the Isle of Man in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there are archaeological and circumstantial clues on which to draw, and since it seems likely that conditions changed very little before the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, there is sufficient evidence to sketch a picture of what daily life was like. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there is a wealth of documentary evidence to chart the changing conditions across the social strata, not least for the expanding merchant and professional classes, which mirror social changes in north-west England, although the peculiar circumstances of the prosperity brought by the running trade and the challenges of its collapse make the Island's eighteenth-century story distinctive.

Most families, from the most successful quarterland farmers down to the majority poor, had to rely on their own resources in times of individual or collective hardship. There was no secular provision for those in need. It was expected that families would support their own, and where this failed it was the church, through the parishes, which maintained an increasingly effective framework of social care. By contrast, the Stanleys and Atholls used the Island for the most part as a source of income, and only occasionally, as for example during the governorship of the enlightened William Sacheverell, were policies introduced to benefit the majority. Without the help of the church and individual philanthropy, conditions for many would have been desperate. Yet the support of the church came within a framework of moral and social control, designed both to preserve family structures and to promote adherence to a strict moral code, enforced by ecclesiastical legislation and the rule of the church courts.